Shannon Wheeler’s Closet Discovery

 

Here’s the third in Ink Spill‘s series of New Yorker cartoonists talking about an important cartoon connection in their lives.   The earlier posts: Felipe Galindo on Steinberg , and Tom Cheney on Charles Rodrigues.

 

Shannon Wheeler, a New Yorker contributor since 2009 (his first cartoon for the magazine appears above), as well as the creator of the series,Too Much Coffee Man, for which he won an Eisner Award, talks about discovering the work of Gahan Wilson. Shannon was four at the time:

 

Before I could read, in the closet of the guest room, at my grandmother’s lake house, I found a stack of Playboy magazines. I remember starting at the top of the stack and going through every issue. The words were unintelligible, the pictures were incomprehensible, but the cartoons were… interesting. Most of the cartoons didn’t make sense but every now and again I’d hit one that was fascinating. There were monsters, bulbous heads, tentacles, aliens…those were the Gahan Wilson cartoons. I started looking for that style because they had a story to them that didn’t need words. It gave me a thrill because I couldn’t read the words but I was reading the images. My grandmother found me in a pile of Playboys and she was furious. She punished me even though I had no idea what I’d done wrong. To this day I read Gahan Wilson cartoons with a resonant thrill of doing something I shouldn’t be doing – I can’t help but think it also started me on a path of wanting to draw cartoons myself. Anything that could fire up my calm grandmother must have some inherent power and I wanted part of it.

 

 

 

Left: Wheeler just a couple of years before he began heading down the pathway to Cartoonville.